How social media supports your SEO

These days, social media sites are no longer an exclusive place to virtually hang out with your friends. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest have become both business and consumer friendly and the result has been incredibly beneficial to businesses around the world. Savvy business owners are realising the substantial potential to generate extra traffic to their website through successful social media marketing. Let’s take a closer look…

Did you know that it’s not just the big search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing that people use to find what they’re looking for? With more and more people turning to social media sites for their business needs (advertising etc.), increasing numbers of consumers are using these platforms to search for local businesses and services. Due to the ease of interaction and the ability to keep up-to-date with regular posts and updates, social media is a highly effective way of engaging with new and current customers with very little effort, time and outlay.

As a business owner, it’s important to boost your brand authority with your social media influence. You can do this by sharing relevant and interesting content, which provides the reader with valuable information. A regularly updated social media account will encourage and nurture your customer links – social shares are the new link building and it’s a quick, easy and effective way to build your online profile. Great content will get shared and reach a wider audience whilst you sleep, meaning your customers will actually help you with your marketing! The flipside of this of course is that if you allow your posts to dwindle from month to month then people may become disengaged from your brand and you could find yourself back at square one.

Remember, Google now includes recent and relevant tweets in search results, meaning that regular and valuable updates are now more important than ever. If you’re regularly tweeting insightful information and useful links, you can smile throughout the day knowing that not only will your tweets reach your followers (and possibly their followers, too, if they decide to retweet), but also anyone who searches on Google for something similar and relevant!

Don’t limit yourself to just Twitter though, Google also (rather unsurprisingly!) loves Google+! Not only does Google+ work wonders for your SEO by appearing high in Google searches with results containing links to your website (via your Google+ page), but Google+ ‘Authorship’ allows you to publish content to the web, with tags showing that you created it and links to your website. Want to know the best bit? Authorship automatically lets Google know that your article has been published and thus it will almost instantly appear in Google searches!

The key thing with the way Google (and other major search engines for that matter) ranks websites is that it is no longer all about keywords. SEO is becoming more human-friendly and thus is based more on the content you share with others and how relevant, informative and well written your content is. This means that now, more so than ever, content is King. Well-formed and interesting articles and blog posts are fast rising up the search engine rankings, whilst keyword heavy, uninspiring ‘sales style’ posts could leave you right down at the bottom of page 27!

Remember, the goal is to create super valuable content that people will love and understand. Once you’ve created it, share it across every platform you can get your hands on! People need to love your content so much that they’re inclined to share it through their own accounts, so get writing!